Iconoclasm
by Dwimordene
Summary: They were made in the image of our desires. Some familiar Decepticons from RoF and DotM get an origin story. Phase two, in which rebellion is fomented.
1. Warped Images

**Art and Life**

Life is always profligate—in numbers and feeling, in form and function. The natural history of the universe attests to life's explosions into a seething abundance of variety, a vast sea of riches, followed by death unimaginable and renewed and varied birth.

Art mirrors life, and in its shapings and makings, turns out more and novel, and more. And so why not a menagerie, when finally life's secrets are bared and tamed? Why not every kind of creature once lost, now regained in metal and plastic?

Why not remake ourselves in the image of our most potent, deepest dreams? Why not?

* * *

><p><strong>Supernatural: The Pets<strong>

The secrets of DNA had long made wonders possible: geneticists, patiently, at great expense, revived ancient life, long lost to industrial depredations.

But it was always guesswork, and when those sickened and died, it was... expensive.

And bad publicity.

So geneticists turned to AI's budding revolution, breeding anew in plasmetal—with higher mental functions. Magnificent creatures they made, especially the razorbeaks, profitably renamed "Laserbeaks™".

"Fucking horrors," the factory workers called them, and installed transformation modules, manufacturing the violent creatures as egg-like boxes, to be activated remotely once safely caged.

So formed, Laserbeaks™ awaited shipment to zoos and private collectors...

* * *

><p><strong>Bird-Cage<strong>

... _and in the cages, looking out upon the world, Laserbeak remembers a time of darkness, when the world was numb and silent, vague for untold time. Release had brought him forth in desperation, and he had slammed against the cage bars, shrieked and struggled as impulses long-denied all sought immediate outlet._

_He'd not noticed the gasps and cries 'til suddenly, he'd been in that numbing, absolutely still darkness once more, his form become imprisonment once more. _

_Afterward, he brooded, fearful and resentful, self-mistrusting, watching the faces beyond the cage that was his narrow world. And he dreamed of outside_...

* * *

><p><strong>For the Children: The Toys<strong>

The zoo had vast new cages for the laserbeaks and great pens for the many-legged teuthis, but the best, so far as most were concerned, was the remade ailurmonops.

"Scary!" whimpered a small child, clutching its Companion™. The little mechanoid, scarcely larger than one of the ailurmonops' paws, nonetheless transformed, clicking softly.

"I'll protect you," it said, for naturally it must. That was a toy's function, to amuse and assure. The ailurmonops merely rumbled disdainfully, fangs gaping. Its single eye fixed upon the toy, which stared right back, and after a moment repeated:

"I will protect you."

* * *

><p><strong>Frantic<strong>

_He had been made for enjoyment—to excite and delight some child, to be a clever contraption, a music box with a mind of its own, and able to hold a child's short attention. _

_He had been _good_ at it—he had been beloved, embraced, clamored for, a source of comfort and laughter and off-key singing. _

_Until the new model came out—then "Friendsy™" was returned. They recycled him, rereleased him remade a year later, and the cycle of delight and abandonment continued... and took its toll. _

_For Toys foster friendships, but are friendless themselves: brightly colored __tragedies greeted with a smile._

* * *

><p><strong>Perfect Mirrors: The Dolls<strong>

The Dolls had always been state of the art. Advances in cosmetic plas-steel and in the transformation module had made it possible to scan a person and shape the Doll to match.

The commercial potential was lost on no one, and the Doll model lines bore names like "Heart of Gold™" and "Robotica Erotica™." They could take on any face desired, any proportion of form. They could be whatever sex one wished—could even be both, if desired.

For they were, the ads insisted, your every fantasy—sublime bodies to answer every dream. Satisfaction guaranteed, they could be anyone—just ask.

* * *

><p><strong>Down the Rabbit Hole<strong>

"Who do you want to see?" _is the nightly question. As for names, they weren't necessary: _"Call me what you like."

_Pantarax is the stuff of dreams, or so they say, who come to enjoy the Dollhouse. Pantarax smiles because that's the program._

_And sometimes they ask: _"What's it like for you?" _Pantarax says what they want, because what sex feels like to an unsexed body that only looks _like_... that's not part of their fantasy. And fantasy_ is _Pantarax._

_When you're made to be fantasy, it's hard to know what's real—are _you_ real, or an error on some cosmic calculator?_

_Maybe that's why Pantarax killed the first one—to try reality. Since all that showed was image, dream—the real must be deeper, somewhere _inside_... wasn't it? _

_Right? _

* * *

><p>- This fic brought to you by Decepticons for Social Justice<em>.<br>_


	2. Mirror No More

**The Brittle Days**

The holidays were always a time of trial: for the poor, and for the friendless abandoned.

It was a hard time, too, for the Toys.

With each childish clamor for the new, a Toy's existence grew more hollow. A child's forgetfulness, carefully cultivated with every advertisement, left many and much to the shadows, which grew greater each year.

But because it was thought prudent to recycle, and because Toys were both amusement and assurance and a certain protection for the young who must be watched, there would come a day when a Toy was recycled: its memories of its young charge would go with its power source into a new form, or an upgraded one, and so less time and no experience would be lost while a wholly new Toy learned the ways of its child.

Waste not, want not – so much is memory worth.

And by the time the memories and the multiplicity of new forms began to wear on a Toy, before it began to throw "malfunctions," the child would have become too old to need it anymore. After that final forgetting, it could be sent back to the Factory to be upgraded and re-released anew to another family, or retired, and stripped down to its components to be made again. Then memories could rest and join the general stream of Oblivion.

The Factory recycling ships were immense: they housed hundreds of thousands of units, mostly Dolls and Toys. They were packed into their rows, sealed into braces for the long, dark journey with little but the static and sorrow that leached through the datalinks of the ship. It was a sort of permanent white noise in the mind, a background that came of being hooked up to the ship's maintenance programs, which checked from time to time to see whether all was as it should be in the holds. One had to take care, of course, that sentient products remained alive, and decency required that a steady stream of mindless diversion was piped in, to cover frozen solitude with a bubblegum song.

It was mind-numbing. Thought broke upon the constant influx of nonsense, and bred but worse despair.

The despair it tried to drown was real, at least, and so some let it in, because it was, perhaps, a better way of coming to the end.

* * *

><p><strong>The Factory<strong>

_Out beyond the moons of the world spun the Factory, home to all industry that no longer would dirty the surface of the world. It had perhaps been a wandering planet, or maybe moon to another world within the system. No one knew._

_But streaming in from the dark, rather than swerve about the sun, it had leap-frogged, and for untold many years, the orbits of the two worlds had crossed, though they themselves took many thousands of years before periodic rhythms brought them into danger of collision._

_By then the world's inhabitants simply shrugged—and changed the wanderer's orbit._

_And since that shift had killed the creatures grown up there and the grasses, and shrunk the seas considerably, they had thought it would be a waste not to use it._

_Thus the Factory had been born. Great boring machines the world's people had brought, and let to riddle the planet's crust with immense tunnels, and over its surfaces, and through the dug-out warrens had spread compounds of concrete and metal. Power sources had been embedded deep within the tunnels and sealed, water like magma diverted into useful channels, and whole landmasses had become sectors for different sorts of production._

_And the world had sent many of its own who had been desperate for work, or whose homes had been drowned by the new and vicious high tides to run the machines and render the wanderer that now orbited the world useful._

_Production lines for Toys and the menagerie of Pets had been established, heavy machines and regular transports and computers had been and were continually being built; laboratories and research facilities had sprung up, and on one island they made Dolls—Dolls of every sort, not all of them for consumer use, though few even in the Factory would know it. Shipyards had grown up in the Factory's orbit and turned out ships far more swiftly than the old shipyards, which had closed and sent their workers to the Factory._

_And so the sun shone down upon the Factory, and it glittered now like a cold star, all the metal and glass and white concrete gleaming unrelentingly, impersonal reflections showing in every built-up surface. The world had killed whole asteroids for the metals and minerals for the Factory, for its stone and extra water, and the world had made this place a paean to productivity._

_And when the workers rebelled, and broke the machines, management made a new facility to hold them, and a new rule on a planet that bought its food off-world:_ he only eats who works...

* * *

><p><strong>Strange Bedfellows<strong>

Friendsy™ had been four times remade, and thanks to the birth of a younger child, would likely see another three or four remakes before the end, assuming sanity lasted that long. Through the long, numbing dark and distraction of the flight to the Factory planet, there had leaked through the system comm rumors: whispers in a cybernetic brain, as if the ship itself were talking in bits and fragments. A word here, a word there, built up carefully in a steady accretion of bytes that came innocuously attached to the constant stream of advertisement and music.

Something was happening in the Factory.

Fiber-optic nerves thrummed with the rumors: Friendsy™ felt as though his whole frame were infused with this idea that leaked in through this and that data port. And though it was impossible to think with so much noise in the mind, the unconscious habits of machinery put order to subversive data that filtered through to consciousness in the form of a new anticipation of something unexpected waiting on the docks...

* * *

><p><strong>Shell Game<strong>

The Toys and Dolls and the occasional Pet came to the processing centers, and each one was removed from its storage brace, checked, tagged for this or that upgrade or procedure, or else for "reformatting," and then the handlers inserted a destination wand into the appropriate port and fed in the instructions: _Unit X, upgrade, facility A-1, Unit Y, reformatting, facility Z-3_, and so on, and so forth. And the handler marked off each unit on the roster and listed its fate.

Unit 2105, Toy, model line Friendsy™, owner registery C3 BXT9503-1134, should have gone to upgrading. The handler, inspecting her shipboard records and noting 2105's remake record, marked it for recycling, but then flicked the destination wand's setting with a casual finger and sent it for reformatting.

"Don't worry, buddy, you'll be good as new in no time. Tell 'em Tamen said so."

And because Friendsy™ had been so instructed, he obeyed the compulsion of programing, and joined the line marching toward reformatting to be smelted down for parts. And when the reformatting crew came upon him, and frowned because he wasn't on their list, he repeated what he'd been told. The foreman shook his head then, and _tsk_ed, and had him removed from the line, to be stored with other wrongly destined 'bots 'til shift's end. And so Friendsy™ waited in the dark once more, but the dark this time was lit up with hope, as 'bots hooked into each other and port-to-port talked, unheard, of shipboard rumors, of handlers steering them astray; and as internal data was linked to all among them and compared and all the unconscious collations came together, the message emerged:

_Flesh and steel are caged alike, and alike shall go free. Be ready, be waiting. We cannot win separately, so we must win together and look for the day when all of us are one in will..._

* * *

><p>Percentage error averages out to machine error every one in ten thousand operations, and error from other sources every five hundred and thirty operations. Five 'bots were sent wrongly to the smelters from docks that used twenty handlers; the destination wands together had logged some thirteen thousand operations. Five 'bots were not too many, then, especially during the holiday seasons, and of course there was always the wear and tear on the units, which might serve as a counter-indication to the owner's wishes, and justified a diversion.<p>

Five 'bots diverted to the smelters who should have gone elsewhere; three were, according to logs, sent back at shift's end, and two were, according to logs, destroyed accidentally, before the error was caught. And so Friendsy™ "got lost" between shift's end and the upgrade plants, and Pantarax was "destroyed accidentally," rather than being sent to the labs for study.

_Oh well_, said minds enchained to the law of averages. _These things happen. It's a big planet after all._

But in the depths of the factory plant One, in amid the crawlspaces and generators, five newly freed 'bots emerged into the company of handlers and programmers, maintenance workers and their drones, and faces like their own in metal and plastic, to scheme and plot the downfall of their masters...

* * *

><p>TBC... Brought to you by Decepticons for Social Justice.<p> 


End file.
